A few 16 man HM tips: We found keeping 3 ranged on the ground off the tanks kept the domes from spawning on the tanks but if your ranged are prone to dying it's probably safer to go with 4. Another tip which might help - we found that most people in our raid saw the blue domes consistently if they reduced the camera distance from their character for this encounter. Your mileage may vary.

The rabid casuals are out in force. Elitists beware!

The combat log is no better than any of the other current means we have available to us for time validation. It is not difficult to manipulate at all given that all in game time based information is based off your local machine time and not some sort of internal server clock. If this is the case with the combat log (and I believe it is, I could be wrong though), all it would take would be to change the time on your computer before a raid to make your kills appear to have taken place earlier than they actually occurred. This requires maybe 4 or 5 mouse clicks to do, not a great deal of effort. In the event that the combat log is timestamped based on an internal server clock it is still very easy to manipulate a text file. The loopholes that a handful of guilds have been abusing are being worked upon as Timelord has already indicated. More details on these changes will be available once they implemented.

I'd actually like to add one point to my original list and that is character transfers to the public test server. The test server as a testing environment is close to meaningless in it's current state because no one can really test anything. Players will always be the best testers, particularly in volume. Please add this feature before 1.2 is pushed to the PTS so we can ensure this patch is delivered as smoothly as possible.

I do have to admit the puzzle bosses were pretty fun (Ancient Pylons & G4-B3 Heavy Fabricator). Something a little different from the norm. These fights also do have slightly different mechanics on the higher difficulty modes which is one of the things we're really pushing for. I think the issue on these puzzle fights is more in tuning than anything else - the new mechanics don't really make the fight much harder if at all but it's definitely a step in the right direction.

This I don't really agree with. Essentially your post seems to be grounded in your experience in Rift high end raiding and assumes that we are asking for a similar raiding environment to be established in SW:TOR but this is simply not the case. The raiding system is fundamentally different and it boils down to the thing we have been talking about quite extensively in this thread - SW:TOR has 3 difficulty modes to work with. Rift simply did not have this feature in any form. We are not asking that end game content be locked to an elite few. My post and several others have basically indicated that the normal modes of said content are very well tuned and offer just about every play the chance to experience the content. I even state in my post that hard mode also should be a point of aspiration for even the casual raider and something that can be accomplished by the casual raider with time and effort. Nightmare mode however should represent a significantly higher challenge for the people that want that challenge. This takes absolutely nothing away from the casual player's capacity to tackle end game content. All this does is use a system that is already in place to try and satisfy two different audiences with divergent interests. I would really like for someone using this argument to explain how making the higher difficulty modes more difficult detracts from their ability to enjoy end game content - I simply don't see it. Using the existing capacity to differentiate difficulty in end game content actually opens up end game content to a broader audience in total than simply saying raid content should be designed either for the casual or for the hardcore raider. To me this feels like an especially poor strategy if this is truly what they are aiming to do. For one thing the legacy system is not even active at present so the incentive is currently non-existent. Even when the legacy system is implemented the incentive of playing through what are the same quests, apart from the storyline, just to unlock a few new races or other legacy vanity items will not keep players interested. I am not even talking about hardcore raiders with this - I simply don't see how such a weak incentive and repetitive content can keep long term subscriptions. Worse still is the fact that the leveling process is for the most part solo oriented content. If rolling alts is the content that is intended to keep players active and even if this were to actually work - which I firmly believe it would not - it would render the strong multi-player emphasis of the end game obsolete. This would be a major design problem in an MMO given that such games are inherently geared toward groups of players rather than individuals.

I was actually going to post something similar to this. It simply isn't productive for this dissolve into name calling where people call raiders basement dwellers who need to get a job and on the flip side casual players being referred to as people who want to be rewarded without putting in any effort. If anything this thread shows that these stereotypes are far too simplistic and almost meaningless as labels. There has been support from a broad spectrum of players, casual, hardcore and even those in-between, for the suggested changes. Opposition and criticism of the suggested changes has mostly come from more casual players but I have absolutely no doubt that there are raiders out there would not agree with the changes that I and others have proposed. That these players have not posted in disagreement in this thread does not mean that they do not exist. I would urge people coming from both sides of this argument to really think about what you are saying and to make compelling arguments for your case rather than resort to childish name calling. Resorting to insults is essentially an indicator that your argument has no substance or foundation. You are doing a disservice to the view you are trying to promote by resorting to this kind of behaviour.

I think the mostly positive responses this thread and several other similar threads have gotten indicate that they would not be re-tuning things for the sake of any singular "random person". The reason I am not using hard numbers is because admittedly I do not have them. I have never pretended to have them. This is in contrast to your own approach where you use hard numbers and they are (yes I am going to use a hard number here) 100% made up. Even assuming I did play as much you suggest this means that you are contrasting me with the casual player that plays substantially less. If this is the case why do you even care about the tuning of content you will never spend enough time to reach in any event? At this point I really think you are just trolling. If you want to post some more pseudo statistical gibberish be my guest. I've said my piece and clearly the number of others who feel much the same way are far from insignificant in their number. You only have to look at the response this thread and other similar threads have received to fathom that.

A few points: 1) The content is already made - no one is asking for content to be made for the hardcore crowd only. We are simply asking for Bioware to make use of the 3 difficulty settings and tune them such that the hard and nightmare modes represent a challenge. This does not lock anyone out of anything. Everyone still gets to see the end game content at varying levels of difficulty. 2) Your examples are massively exaggerated. If you can show me any statistic that says there are 100 casual players that actually raid for every 1 hardcore raider I'll retract that but I think the chances of that happening are abysmally small. 3) If the only thing for us to do is simply "roll an alt" I can't see this game retaining many long term subscribers. A large number of people simply have absolutely no interest in doing this and, even for those that do, if the only re-playability in the game lies in rolling alts the majority of the game's subscribers will move on to other things within 2-3 months. SW:TOR promised a decent end game and has the system in place to deliver such. Large numbers of people, myself included, bought the game based upon this. If the game's developers have no intention of delivering this kind of content I'm okay with that. I will feel that I was mislead but I'm not going to lose any sleep over it and will simply move onto another game that doesn't mislead its customers. Patch 1.2 will be the real test for SW:TOR. I'm eager to see what happens because I really think it will be a make or break point for this game.

Except that it hasn't taken weeks it has been in the game since release and has not even been acknowledged. This means they have had two whole months to fix this and have not even admitted the bug exists. If you think that is reasonable you have exceptionally low standards I must say.

Nightmare definitely feels pretty unrewarding in it's current state. Here's hoping they plan out the gear drops much better in the next raid tier.

It's really good to see some different perspectives here, both casual and hardcore, clamoring for harder content. I'm not saying every hardcore player and every casual player wants harder content but it does show that there are a broad range of players who very much want this.

You're carrying things to extremes. No one is asking for that kind of time-sink like a lot of EQ raids were. With that said we are looking to be challenged in these games and this is totally reasonable given that they have the difficulty system in place to accommodate this. Nor am I or many of the others in this thread asking for this game to focus upon hardcore raiders - at least not more so than the casual player. On a separate note thanks to others for a lot of the recent input. It makes me glad to see that I am far from the only person feeling this way about the current state of SW:TOR raiding.

I don't know, I really think this is more down to raid design than an inherent difference between 16 man and 8 man content. Current raid design certainly forces you to bring in more dps than 8 man. The raid makeup remains proportionately very similar for most fights though. I think though that if duel spec were added to the game the developers would have more freedom to develop fights that use 4 or even more tanks or a higher than usual number of healers. The difference is fairly negligible in any case. In the current tier of content the highest difficulty requires 1 tank for most 8 man content and 2 tanks for most 16 man content. I don't think either comes particularly close to the 1-2-1 balance you are looking for at least in terms of tank numbers.

Primarily the higher challenge although I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a bit of both. The loot though is essentially just some sort of indicator that says to the game's community that this person has done this particular piece of content. I do agree that vanity items could serve just as well to provide that indicator and I would be totally okay with this. I don't have a problem with that kind of game at all. It just isn't one that I want to play and it isn't how SW:TOR has been marketed. The very fact that the game design contains 3 levels of difficulty directly implies that there is meant to be differing grades of raid difficulty in SW:TOR. The naming of these difficulty levels in particular further implies that the game's designers want their raid content to appeal to both the casual raider and the hardcore raider. At the moment it simply does not succeed with the latter. I'm not offended - it's your opinion and you're certainly right that the hardcore raiding audience is much more niche than it used to be. I do have to say that your Farmville analogy is pretty poor though and does very little to reinforce your point. Let's compare it with a like analogy - NFL draws in a much larger audience than the NHL so hockey fans should just resign themselves to the fact that their sport of interest is a thing of the past. I don't agree with this sentiment at all. Just because one product caters to a larger audience does not mean that all smaller audiences are rendered obsolete. There is still a profit to be made in a game that caters to hardcore raiders even if a more casual game has broader appeal. The fact that SW:TOR has the framework with its 3 difficulty modes to cater to both audiences means that, with proper implementation, there is no reason that it cannot try satisfy both sets of customers.

I agree totally. The communication we've had from the developers thus far doesn't make me very optimistic that there will be any relative increase in difficulty though.

I'm obviously discussing how things are now if I am discussing how they should be. This is the whole point of my critique - I have examined the current raid design and I am very critical of it. It is my intention to be critical of it because I believe the current design is especially poor. My whole argument is constructed around how things are now. If you want to challenge me on not examining more closely why things are the way they are now then that is a valid criticism. I did not put any emphasis on this in my original post although it is something I have given an awful lot of consideration toward. To be totally honest I simply cannot fathom why the design is currently the way it is. It makes no logical sense whatsoever to have 3 difficulty modes if you don't plan to to actually make use of that capacity for the differentiation of difficulty. If their goal is simply to make a game where all raid content is easily beaten then having 3 difficulty modes is utterly superfluous. I'm not saying that it is not worth discussing at all. Your initial post challenging my argument referred to a point that I am simply not making. For example I never suggested any of these fixes should be implemented in isolation which seemed to be your main critique of my argument. See below: For that criticism to be valid I would have had to say somewhere that they should implement my proposed changes to raid tuning while NOT implementing the proposed changes I suggested under the problem of gear differentiation. If you can find anywhere I stated or even suggested such I'll eat my hat. The TLDR version is that I'm simply saying your argument is criticizing a point I never made in the first place and is thus redundant. It's not my intention to get into a slanging match with you at any rate so I will simply agree to disagree.

My post already goes over my thoughts on hard mode and nightmare mode rewarding the same grade of loot so this is a moot point. The point of my post is not to go over things as they are but how I think they should be. My point is simply that both changes would need to be made - it is plainly obvious, as you have pointed out, that it would not be feasible to re-tune the raids without re-turning the gear. Additionally, I also conceded in my original post that it is not a good idea to make these changes in the current tier of content. If anything these are all changes which should be implemented for the next tier of content, not before.

The three difficulty modes inherently represent the choice that can be made to play on a harder difficulty for those who enjoy it. I was very clear in my post that I think normal mode has been tuned correctly but that hard and nightmare mode content have been both inadequately tuned and inadequately incentivized. The one thing I do agree with you on is that the gear difference between the tiers does not need to be very big although for me this is more to prevent stat inflation than anything else.

Appreciate your input and this is a shining example of what I mean when I say that the risk vs reward in SW:TOR operations is severely out of whack.

You should heed your own advice. As my post clearly states I am aware of their design intent for raid difficulty and all they have said is that they are aiming for 16 man content to be slightly easier than 8 man content. I addressed my thoughts on this in my post. No. They have not said anything to this effect. There is not one sentence in my post that demands content be brought out faster. I happen to think every 2-3 months is fine so long as the content is difficult enough.

This post is written from the perspective of a hardcore guild raid leader. I fully understand that everyone plays this game for different reasons and my aim in posting this is simply to try and make Bioware aware of how their operations content is being received by people who have a serious interest in SW:TOR raiding. It is very much a critique of what I and many others regard as serious flaws within the SW:TOR operations system and due to its length I have tried to break it down into sections. Lack of variety between difficulty modes One of the core weaknesses of SW:TOR raiding is that there is an alarming lack of variety in boss mechanics. The vast majority of raid encounters play out identically in terms of boss mechanics no matter what difficulty the raid is attempted on. The difficulty is only increased through increased damage and increased boss health pools. The net result is that progression through the higher difficulties feels like little more than a gear check. The lack of new mechanics to adapt to makes the encounters feel very stale and unimaginative. The sense of having genuinely accomplished something by completing nightmare mode content is severely diminished because you simply do not feel as though you have overcome some new obstacle that has been placed in your path. Narrow Range of Raid Difficulty When it was revealed before the release of SW:TOR that it would have three different difficulty modes for raiding I do not believe I was alone in thinking such a system would have huge potential. There has been concerted push among MMO developers to make raid content available to the more casual player in recent years and understandably so - hardcore raiders do not make up a large percentage of the overall market. A three tiered system seemed to be the best possible way to satisfy people at both ends of the MMO spectrum, the casual player and the hardcore raider. Such a system allowed Bioware to implement a raiding system where the normal mode represented an opportunity for just about every player to experience raid content and, to be totally fair to them, this is exactly what they accomplished with normal mode raiding. I have absolutely no problem with the tuning of normal mode raiding. It is very well tuned to offer the vast majority of players to experience raid content and to engage with the storylines surrounding this content. The tuning of hard and nightmare mode content however is especially poor. There should be a significant jump in difficulty going from normal mode to hard mode. As a middle ground hard mode should be tuned to the level that casual or semi-hardcore guilds need a great deal of preparation in terms of gear and consumables to complete them. It is more or less a given that some more hardcore guilds will be able to compensate for a lack of gear with better execution, strategy and by taking more of a min/max approach to their individual roles. This is where the nightmare mode becomes key. Nightmare mode should be tuned such that it absolutely requires every raider to put in the maximum possible effort in terms of pre-raid preparation. It should also require an exceptionally high level of execution and strategy to complete encounters at this level. There is absolutely no reason why nightmare mode content should not be tuned to this level given that normal mode gives the more casual player an entry point to raiding and hard mode gives them something to aspire to. Tuning nightmare mode raid content such that it is able to be completed by the average player simply bloats the system - it simultaneously renders hard mode content obsolete while massively devaluing the inherent sense of achievement in completing nightmare mode content for the hardcore raider. As things currently stand the difficulty level of hard mode and nightmare content should both be significantly increased. As a rough indicator the current difficulty of nightmare mode content is approximately where hard mode should lie and nightmare difficulty should be completely re-tuned such that the difference in difficulty between normal and the new hard mode is similar to that between hard and nightmare mode. At present there is very, very little difference in difficulty between hard and nightmare mode content on 16 man (possibly 8 as well although I do not have personal experience with this). Lack of Gear Differentiation There is a very distinct lack of gear differentiation between encounters of different difficulty. When I am talking about difficulty in this section I am referring not only to normal/hard/nightmare modes but also to the size of the raid given that (at present) 16 man content is more difficult than 8 man content. The gear available through hard mode flashpoints and normal mode operations feels very well tuned. You accumulate Columi level gear through both of these but at a much faster raid through normal mode operations and this feels very intuitive and makes sense. The problem with this is that with only 1 tier of gear above Columi, Rakata, it means that this is all that can be offered for what are effectively 4 different levels of difficulty - 8 man hard, 8 man nightmare, 16 man hard and 16 man nightmare. The sense of achievement in acquiring a Rakata level piece of armor is severely diminished by the fact that it can be acquired just as easily on 8 man hard mode as on 16 man nightmare mode. There are two possible solutions to this. The first is that more of an effort should be put into ensuring that 8 man and 16 man raids are tuned to the same level, although from the latest Q&A it seems like the intent is simply to swing the pendulum back in the other direction and make 16 man content easier than 8 man content (more on that below). Even if it were possible to balance small group raiding with large group raiding, which seems unlikely given that several MMOs have tried and failed to do so, it would still mean that the problem is merely diminished and not resolved. Assuming that both 8 and 16 man raids were tuned to the same level it would still mean that under the current loot model that hard mode raids were awarding exactly the same loot as nightmare mode raids. This is pretty poor planning. It is far to late in this current tier of content to make sweeping changes but ideally it should have been set up as follows: Normal mode OPs and hard mode flashpoints drop entry level gear Hard mode OPs drop mid level gear Nightmare mode OPs drop the best possible gear This would have meant either allocating Tionese level gear to hard mode flashpoints and normal mode operations or else adding a 4th tier of loot higher than Rakata that was only obtainable in nightmare modes. This type of gear spread is very much needed in the next tier of raid content to ensure that each difficulty mode maintains the appropriate level of risk vs reward. Bugs Before I get into the problem of bugged raid content let me say that I understand as a member of a hardcore guild I expect to encounter bugs simply because we are among the first few to complete the content. To expect a bug free raid environment when you are among the first to do said raid content is probably setting yourself up to be disappointed. With that said some of the bugs are so readily reproducable and consistent that I cannot help but believe that the content is either being rushed out with known bugs or that the in house raid testing is lacking or even non-existent. As a developer of an MMO Bioware has any number of guilds at their disposal who would likely assist them with raid testing but it really does seem as if this resource is largely left unused. The ability to call upon a group of people to test your product free of charge is not at all common in most industries and there really is no excuse for Bioware to be releasing raid content that is littered with bugs when they have such a resource available to them. Admittedly of late they have picked up the pace somewhat of late in terms of bug fixing. There does not seem to be any regression testing done with some of these fixes however. A perfect example is in the fix to Soa which prevented the fight from resetting if the tank were to become trapped by a mind trap. The problem was that this fix now causes him to reset threat every time a mind trap is cast. This bug would have been blindingly obvious if the fight was tested even once or twice after the initial fix but instead the secondary bug went live to the game and is still live after a few weeks. More of an effort needs to be made to ensure that these fixes are not simply introducing new bugs into the game. Similarly there are glaring bugs which have simply been ignored for too long. The fact that master loot in operations has frequently caused some loot as well as crafting materials not to drop has been present since release and has STILL yet to be fixed. This is absolutely appalling. Another slightly different example is the bugged reset on the Ancient Pylons encounter in the Eternity Vault. This was supposedly fixed several patches ago according to the patch notes but again, to date this bug is still present in the game. Customer Service This is probably one of the worst aspects of SW:TOR. Response times are the worst I have seen in an MMO with the possible exception of Funcom games. Solutions are rarely found for any problem submitted and the vast bulk of the time you simply receive a generic template reply which indicates that they cannot assist you with your problem but that it has been forwarded on to the appropriate department so that it does not occur in future. With the number of bugs present in the game since release this kind of customer service is entirely inadequate and unacceptable. Given that it has been widely reported that SW:TOR only needed 500,000 subscribers to be profitable and that recent figures show it has over three times that number of subscriptions this lack of investment in delivering quality customer service is nothing short of shameful. I am utterly tired of hearing the argument that the sheer size and scope of SW:TOR and its playerbase makes it virtually impossible for them to deliver good customer service. This is patently absurd. If anything it means that the larger revenues generated by their product make it possible to allocate more resources toward customer service. If this is already occurring then all I can say is that this capital allocated toward customer service is being allocated very wastefully. Lack of Basic Features The lack of basic features that are of critical importance to an MMO with raid content is particularly damning. The lack of a combat log and more detailed UI customization upon release are key features that by this time surely have to be considered as standard. Other features such as dual spec have surely become standard in the MMO industry at this point in time. I am very much aware that the developers have said that these features are being worked on but with a 5 year development and the large development budget of SW:TOR I simply cannot fathom why these features were not available at release. Regarding the Potential Downgrade of 16 Man Operation Difficulty The recent Q&A discussion saw it mentioned that the design intent was for 16 man content to be slightly easier than 8 man content to compensate for the logistics of having to organize a larger number of people. There has been a great outcry over this and for good reason. There are any number of subscribers who want to test themselves vs the most difficult content available to them and if this shifts toward 8 man content instead of 16 man content this will either see guilds running multiple 8 man groups or else fragmenting into several smaller guilds. I genuinely feel that either of these outcomes would be a sad loss for the SW:TOR community as the end result would likely be a game population of small fragmented groups which have very little interaction with each other. This to me goes against the very spirit of what an MMO is all about - it is a slippery slope which diminishes the multi-player element of SW:TOR. Without this multi-player element SW:TOR becomes little more than a single player RPG with very little replay value. I strongly urge the game's designers to re-consider this intended design as it has the potential to be very, very detrimental to the game's long term prospects. What is SW:TOR Getting Right? In terms of raiding I would be being dishonest if I did not say that there is very little that SW:TOR is getting right in terms of its raid content. There are some positive signs though. Fights like Soa really show that Bioware has it within them to generate very dynamic and interesting boss fights that make much more use of the game environment than most other MMOs. If they can couple this with some serious reforms to other aspects of their raiding system, as discussed above, there is no reason they could not go on to dominate the MMO market in much the same way as WoW has for so long. I am not writing this to try and put another nail in SW:TOR's coffin - quite the opposite. When I began playing this game I really thought that this was the next game where I would take root and play for many, many years. I desperately want this game to succeed where so many others have failed shortly after release in recent years. SW:TOR does seem to be heading in that direction however and I can only hope that Bioware takes heed of not just my concerns but of the concerns held by many members of the SW:TOR community. Massive changes in terms of raid design and implementation are absolutely necessary if SW:TOR is to avoid quickly spiraling toward becoming just one of many free to play, casual oriented MMOs on the market.

I believe Milennium also needs to be added. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=205656 Thanks for doing this. It really is very helpful to have something like this to put into perspective how we are all doing in terms of world ranking.

Also looking for confirmation as to whether this was fixed or not in today's patch.